The interior blast door slid open with a heavy, final thud. The space was no longer divided. There was only the lab, and the four figures within it locked in a sudden, terrible standoff.
"Excellent," Dr. Thorne said, rubbing his hands together with a dry, papery sound. He took a step into the main lab, his eyes gleaming with possessive hunger, fixed on Lily. "Now, now, my dear Specimen 734. Time for your relocation. Your contributions to science will be legendary."
Sarah pulled Lily further behind her, shielding the child with her own body. "Stay the hell away from her, Aris," she snarled, all pretense of professional courtesy gone.
The Infiltrator remained in the observation room, seemingly content to let Thorne handle the "asset retrieval." Its data-leech was still active, a thin fiber-optic tail snaking from its suit to the server port, siphoning away The Foundry's most valuable secrets with quiet, digital vampirism.
Leo moved, placing himself squarely between Thorne and his family. The scientist, high on his imminent victory, merely scoffed.
"Step aside, Custodian," Thorne sneered. "Your function here is concluded. You are a janitor. This is a matter of science. You wouldn't understand the importance of the work being done here."
"I understand that you sold us all out," Leo said, his voice dangerously level. "I understand that you put a child in danger. And I understand that my job is to clean up messes. And right now, you're the biggest mess in the room."
He had to end this. Now. But a direct fight was suicide. The Infiltrator was an unknown, but likely on par with the Adjuster. Even Thorne was probably augmented in some way by his new employers.
Leo didn't look at the enemies. He looked at the room. This lab was Thorne's kingdom. Every blinking light, every sterile surface was a testament to his obsession with control and data. It was a System. And Thorne was about to learn a fundamental truth about systems: they can be crashed.
"You're making a grave error, Miller," Thorne said, taking another step forward. The Infiltrator watched, impassive, its analysis likely concluding that Thorne could handle the two unarmed humans.
"No," Leo said. "You did." He looked past Thorne, at the complex array of machinery in the observation room. He saw the data spike. He saw the humming server. And he saw the room's independent, high-voltage power conduit, clearly marked behind a yellow cage, as per Foundry safety regulations. Regulations he now knew by heart.
Safety regulations were a system too.
Leo activated [Breakdown].
He didn't target the Infiltrator. He didn't target the locked door. He targeted the ten heavy-duty bolts holding the protective yellow cage over the power conduit in the other room.
From twenty feet away, through a wall of blast-glass, the bolts on the cage behind the Infiltrator and Thorne began to unscrew themselves at an impossible speed.
Thorne didn't notice. The Infiltrator's threat-assessment protocols were focused on the room it was in, not the wall behind it.
The cage, its supports gone, fell away from the wall with a loud CLANG.
Now for Part Two.
Leo's eyes flicked to a rolling liquid nitrogen canister in the corner of his own room, a standard piece of lab equipment. He focused again. [Breakdown]. This time, on the canister's primary release valve.
With a deafening hiss, the valve failed completely. The canister shot across the lab floor like an out-of-control rocket, propelled by a jet of super-cooled nitrogen gas.
The Infiltrator, its protocols finally screaming at the new, high-velocity kinetic threat, spun around. But the canister wasn't aimed at it. It shot past them, through the open blast door, and into the observation room.
It slammed directly into the now-exposed, high-voltage power conduit.
The result was spectacular. The conduit ruptured, unleashing a contained lightning storm of raw, ungrounded electricity. The liquid nitrogen, a super-coolant, flash-vaporized, causing a massive, instantaneous pressure change. The air itself seemed to crackle and explode.
VWWWOOOOMP!
The entire observation room was engulfed in a storm of electrical fire and cryogenic fog. The Infiltrator was thrown back against the wall, its body convulsing as its systems were flash-frozen and electrocuted simultaneously. Thorne screamed, his fancy lab coat catching fire as an arc of electricity leaped to him. The main server rack, which the data-spike was plugged into, exploded in a shower of sparks, ending the download permanently.
The lights in the entire Med-Sci wing flickered and died, the secondary explosion having tripped the main breakers. A moment later, the red emergency lights kicked in, bathing the scene in a hellish crimson light.
The blast door between the rooms slammed shut as the emergency protocols reactivated.
Leo stood panting in the eerie red gloom of the lab. He was separated from the chaos he had just unleashed. Sarah was staring at the now-opaque blast-glass, her face a mask of shock and awe. Lily had stopped crying and was just watching Leo, her wide eyes filled not with fear, but with a strange, profound curiosity.
Leo had faced two high-level threats. And he had neutralized them both without ever touching them, using nothing more than a fundamental understanding of safety regulations and pressure valves. He hadn't just cleaned the room. He had weaponized the building code.